Patent Document 1, Patent Document 2, Patent Document 3, Patent Document 4, Patent Document 5, Patent Document 6 and Patent Document 7 disclose conventional information processing systems designed to perform interpretation or translation.
The information processing system disclosed in Patent Document 1 comprises a voice recognition unit, a machine translation unit, a voice synthesis unit, a display unit, and an interactive managing unit. The information processing system thus configured and disclosed in Patent Document 1 operates as will be described below.
The voice recognition unit recognizes the voice inputted to it. The result of voice recognition is supplied to the machine translation unit. The machine translation unit performs machine translation on the result of voice recognition. If the result is not composed of data units fitted for machine translation, the machine translation unit instructs the voice recognition unit to change the data units. Then, the voice synthesis unit outputs voice.
The conventional information processing systems disclosed in Patent Documents 2 to 4, which are other examples of systems that are designed to perform interpretation or translation, have a voice recognition unit, a machine translation unit and a voice synthesis unit, as is disclosed in Patent Document 1. The conventional information processing systems disclosed in Patent Documents 1 to 4 are all designated to perform interpretation or translation. Their objective is to achieve highly-accurate and natural interpretation or translation.
In discussing the prior art, Patent Document 5 refers to a robot that performs preset motions in accordance with the user's instructions or the external conditions. The document discloses another robot that comprises a means for recognizing the external conditions and a means for generating emotion from internal conditions. This robot reflects emotional changes on the dialog.
Patent Document 6 describes a robot that controls characters or conditions displayed as images, in accordance with the information supplied from a voice recognition unit, a machine translation unit, a voice input unit or the like and representing the user's emotion. Patent Document 7 describes a robot that has a translation function, a foreign-language conversation function, a study function of determining whether the user's answers are correct, a pronunciation-evaluating function, and the like.    Patent Document 1: JP-A-2001-100784    Patent Document 2: JP-A-2001-100788    Patent Document 3: JP-A-2001-117921    Patent Document 4: JP-A-2001-117922    Patent Document 5: JP-A-2002-283261    Patent Document 6: JP-A-2001-117752    Patent Document 7: JP-A-2002-351305